Hardware Acceleration on Windows

Emby supports the following hardware acceleration variants on Windows

  • Nvidia NVDEC & NVENC
    API for video encoding and decoding acceleration using Nvidia GPUs

  • Intel QuickSync Video
    Intel's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core

  • AMD AMF
    AMD Advanced Media Framework - multimedia API AMD hardware for real-time processing of multimedia

  • Microsoft DXVA
    Microsoft DirectX Video Acceleration API - hardware independent API for hardware accelerated video decoding

Nvidia NVDEC & NVENC

Nvidia provides two hardware acceleration interfaces:

  • NVENC API for video encode acceleration
  • NVDEC API for video decode acceleration (formerly called NVCUVID API)

NVIDIA GPUs contain one or more hardware-based decoder and encoder(s) (separate from the CUDA cores) which provides fully-accelerated hardware-based video decoding and encoding for several popular codecs. With decoding/encoding offloaded, the graphics engine and the CPU are free for other operations.

GPU hardware accelerator engines for video decoding (referred to as NVDEC) and video encoding (referred to as NVENC) support faster than real-time video processing which makes them suitable to be used for transcoding applications, in addition to video playback.

Supported Accelerations

The following accelerations are currently supported by Emby. Please note that Emby may not support all accelerations offered by the hardware and that not all hardware devices will support all accelerations.

  • Decoders
    • H.264 (AVC)
    • H.265 (HEVC)
    • MPEG2
    • MPEG4
    • VC1
    • VP8
    • VP9
  • Encoders
    • H.264 (AVC)

Hardware Requirements

Hardware acceleration is available for most Nvidia devices starting with GPUs from the Kepler generation (e.g. GeForce GT 630) onwards, including both consumer and professional devices. Detailed information about supported hardware can be found in Nvidia's GPU Support Matrix.

Required Setup Steps

Install the latest drivers for your Nvidia hardware directly from Nvidia Driver Downloads page. It is highly recommended to use these drivers instead of the ones that are shipped with Windows. The minimum required driver version on Windows is 471.41
It is not required to install any other tools or SDKs from Nvidia.

Remarks

  • Emby supports headless operation for Nvidia
    It is not required to connect a monitor
  • Nvidia acceleration also works when Emby is run as a Windows service

Further Reading

Nvidia Video Codec SDK
GPU Support Matrix
Nvidia Driver Downloads
NVENC, NVDEC

Intel QuickSync Video

Intel® Quick Sync Video uses the dedicated media processing capabilities of Intel® Graphics Technology to decode and encode fast, enabling the processor to complete other tasks and improving system responsiveness.

Supported Accelerations

The following accelerations are currently supported by Emby. Please note that Emby may not support all accelerations offered by the hardware and that not all hardware devices will support all accelerations.

  • Decoders
    • H.264 (AVC)
    • H.265 (HEVC)
    • MPEG2
    • VC1
    • VP8
    • VP9
  • Encoders
    • H.264 (AVC)
  • Hardware Filters
    • Scaling
    • Deinterlacing

Hardware Requirements

Quick Sync was initially built into some Sandy Bridge CPUs, but not into Sandy Bridge Pentium or Celeron CPUs.
An overview of acceleration capabilities built into the various CPU generations can be found here: Hardware decoding and encoding. and here GPU Acceleration Capabilities.

Required Setup Steps

Install the latest graphics drivers for your Intel COU with integrated graphics directly from Intel's site: Drivers & Software It is highly recommended to use these drivers instead of the ones that are shipped with Windows. It is not required to install the Intel Media SDK.

Remarks

  • Emby only supports headless operation (and running as a service) with Intel QuickSync when using the D3D11 codec. For normal mode you will need to connect a physical monitor to the video output.

Further Reading

Intel QuickSync Video
Codec Support by CPU Generation
GPU Acceleration Capabilities
Drivers & Software

AMD AMF

AMD Advanced Media Framework is a light-weight, portable multimedia framework that abstracts away most of the platform and API-specific details and allows for easy implementation of multimedia applications using a variety of technologies, such as DirectX 11, OpenGL, and OpenCL and facilitates an efficient interoperability between them.

Supported Accelerations

The following accelerations are currently supported by Emby. Please note that Emby may not support all accelerations offered by the hardware and that not all hardware devices will support all accelerations.

  • Encoders
    • H.264 (AVC)

Hardware Requirements

The AMF framework is compatible with most recent Radeon GPUs starting with the Southern Islands family and APUs of the Kabini, Kaveri, Carrizo families and newer.

Required Setup Steps

Install the latest Radeon Software directly from AMD's website: AMD Drivers & Support It is not required to install the AMF SDK. The minimum required software version is: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.7.3 (16.30.2311)

Remarks

  • Emby currently does not support headless operation with AMD AMF You will need to connect a physical monitor to the video output.
  • AMD AMF acceleration does not work when Emby is run as a Windows service

Further Reading

AMD Advanced Media Framework
AMF SDK
AMD Drivers & Support

Microsoft DXVA

DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) is an Microsoft API for using hardware acceleration to speed up video processing. Software codecs and software video processors can use DXVA to offload certain CPU-intensive operations to the GPU. DXVA supports video decoding only, no encoding.

Supported Accelerations

The following accelerations are currently supported by Emby. Please note that Emby may not support all accelerations offered by the hardware and that not all hardware devices will support all accelerations.

  • Decoders
    • H.264 (AVC)
    • H.265 (HEVC)
    • MPEG2
    • VC1

Hardware Requirements

DXVA supports graphics devices from different vendors, including Nvidia, Intel and AMD.

Required Setup Steps

DXVA is a Windows component, and supposed to work with the drivers that are included in Windows. Installing the latest drivers from the manufacturers' websites might still be a good idea.

Remarks

  • Emby only supports headless operation (and running as a service) with D311VA codecs. For plain DXVA2 you will need to connect a physical monitor to the video output.

Common Issues and Solutions

  • Hardware Acceleration Fails with Remote Desktop (RDP) on Windows

Note: Support for headless mode is planned for the future

Further Reading

About DXVA